I chronicle nonsense, mostly about the news, sometimes about pop culture. If you don't think it's nonsensical, then yell at me in the comments.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Let's Talk About Ellis Island Privilege

The problem
with privilege is that you don’t realize you have it. This makes it difficult
to point it out. If you’re an Eloi,
then you are likely completely oblivious of the Morlocks who have made your
life so easy, who are not on the same level as you. It took years for me to
recognize that I have male privilege. And acknowledging that you HAVE privilege
is not the same thing as taking responsibility for how your privilege came
about, nor is it an attempt to make you feel guilty for being who you are. No
one expects you to bear the burdens of other people’s past crimes. That knee-jerk
defensiveness just shows how fragile and precious social statuses are. With all
that said, we need to discuss something.

Some white
people need to deal with their Ellis Island privilege.

One of my FAVORITE
things to hear, besides white dudes telling me what Martin Luther King would
have done, is when white people say something to the effect of, “My
grandparents came here in the 1940’s! They were poor! We CAN’T have privilege!”
OK, I get it. You come from a group of people whose ancestors were NOT
architects/beneficiaries of the 398-year old construct of American racism that
still affects people of color today. Your parents got some shit for having bad
accents. They were poor. They had to work hard to get what they could so that
you can read and live in denial now. You forget, though, that once those
accents melt away, they could easily assimilate into society without the burden
of a color adjective, no matter what their economic level is. So you may not
have been a part of the system created in the United States, you just moved
into it. However, the fact that you COULD move into was your family’s first
exercise of American white privilege.

Except for the hundreds of Jewish refugees on
the MS St. Louis that was turned
away for fear that they were Nazi spies; white immigrants have enjoyed a pretty
easy flow into the US compared to other immigrants, even despite the quotas and
language laws. While some were arriving to Ellis Island right after WWII, Japanese descendants were being JUST let
out of American concentration camps, as their internment was deemed constitutional
by the Supreme Court. There were ALWAYS “mysterious” limits to how many people
from “brown” countries could immigrate. The government will cite security
concerns or something, which in some cases may be true. But how threatening is
a Haitian or Jamaican immigrant who wants to reunite with their siblings as
opposed to a Russian who may have married a US defense contractor within 6
months of meeting him? That is Ellis Island privilege.

I witnessed it
firsthand. In my globetrotting years, when I married my Ukrainian wife and
applied for a visa for her before we headed back to the US, I was told that it
would be at LEAST a year before she could set foot on American soil. I was told
this by an acquaintance that had waited 18 months for his Jamaican wife’s visa
paperwork to process. My wife got her visa in less than 6 months. She got her
green card in less than 3. My friend was still waiting while my marriage
started to fall apart. Ellis Island privilege.

So if you are
still claiming that you CAN’T have privilege because you’re only first or
second generation, please stop. We’re laughing at you, but no one is attacking
you. You have privilege. You’re still the same person, just a little bit more
knowledgeable.